30 Oct
2000
30 Oct
'00
1:52 p.m.
Actually the Solid State Music video board is a holdover from
his Altair, which contributed a number of parts that went into this
machine. He had used the VDM and a homegrown parallel keyboard
interface with the Altair, as well as with this machine when it had
an 8080 in it. Then he upgraded it to the Z80, which inluded both
serial and parallel ports on the CPU board, so the VDM is no longer
needed or used. He used a serial terminal connected directly to the
CPU board. I've got the source code here that he used to interface
the VB1 with a SWTP KBD5 keyboard, ProTech 3P+S IO board, and the
North Star mini floppy in an Altair 8800. He purchased the Northstar
Micro-Disk System MDS-A with a MDC-A3 controller board in November
'77 for $599.
The Lifeboat distribution disk is labled:
CP/M On North Star Disk
Copyright 1977 Digital Research
Copyright 1977 Lifeboat Associates
Version 1.30 Serial No. 14-040
Jeff
Uhm what are you using for keyboard input if the VDM is output?
--
Power Computing PowerCurve, 400mhz G3, Mac OS 9.0.4
Collector of Classic Microcomputers and Video Game Systems:
http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757
The CP/M 1.3 disk, as well as the North Star
NDOS disk, were
given to me by the original builder of the machine. He also wrote a
small monitor program which resides on the CPU board. One of the
CP/M disks is the original Lifeboat distribution disk, while two
others are costumized, handlabled '27k CP/M' and '43k CP/M'.
I did some looking and find nothing that says Lifeboat did 1.3
for NS*. The copy I have is 1.403 for NS*. They may have
done 1.3 but the timeframes for 1.3 and Lifeboat are off.
Sounds like you need more ram. Get another 16k for safety.
A cromemco ram16 or ram17 should be easy enough to find
or other 64k static.
Allison